Spider Oak - Please stop describing your service as "Zero Knowledge" unless and until you deploy a service that is actually is. E2E encryption great, but it is not the same thing.
In cryptography, "zero knowledge" means something very different than "service providers cannot access cleartext data".
> In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.
z.cash is a zero knowledge system and has a good definition of it on its FAQ:
> Zero knowledge proofs are a scientific breakthrough in the field of cryptography: they allow you to prove knowledge of some facts about hidden information without revealing that information. The property of allowing both verifiability and privacy of data makes for a strong use case in all kinds of transactions, and we’re integrating this concept into a block chain for encrypting the sender address, the recipient address, and the amount. A block chain that encrypts transaction data (making it private) and lacks zero-knowledge proofs also lacks the assurance that all the transactions are valid. This is because the nodes in the network can’t determine whether the sender really had that money or whether they previously sent it to someone else, or never had it in the first place. The encrypted data becomes unverifiable by network nodes.
A few cryptographers have noticed SpiderOak's marketing term Zero Knowledge is inconsistent with the academic definition. Maybe it doesn't mean what we think it means[1]? SpiderOak was one of the first companies to use this phrase commercially and the need has only grown stronger.
At the heart of the issue is the difficulty for end users to decipher the terms cloud vendors use to describe their security. Doing so would require discrimination between transport encryption, data encryption, meta data encryption, encryption at rest vs. in motion, and then most importantly evaluate key management and access. This vocabulary is foreign to most folks. Vendors often exploit the inaccessibility of these topics to make a series of statements that, while often factually correct individually, together create a false sense of privacy.
SpiderOak launched a online backup product for Linux, Mac, and Windows in 2007. The competitors were companies like Xdrive, Mozy, Carbonite and SugarSync. Each claimed that customer data was fully encrypted. Even the most credible journalists writing for well funded publications with fact checking budgets were fooled and repeated these misleading claims to end users. [2]
In 2009 when Dropbox launched, they made misleading claims about the encryption of customer files and their internal ability to access customer's data or provide that data to 3rd parties, leading to a well publicized FTC deceptive trade practices complaint. [3] The deception had been so effective that leading software engineers were shocked to discover Dropbox had full access to the data they had stored online. [4]
In response to customer requests on one of their forums, Mozy explained why it would be "impossible" for a storage service to protect users' privacy by encrypting the file and folder names customers store in a way Mozy could not read. SpiderOak customers had benefited from the impossible for years.
Recently Slack made the unbelievable claim on Twitter that their service includes end to end encryption (it doesn't.) Perhaps they mean from your end to their end?
Lately there's a new phrase "customer managed keys" used by cloud providers, which sounds really great, but is typically just elaborate hand waving that ultimately allows the vendor and their staff the same level of data access as if it were not encrypted.
In 2007 we found ourselves frequently explaining "we don't know the names of your files, the names of your folders, the date they were created or last modified or accessed, their size, their checksums or hashes... in short we know nothing about your data except how much you store." We started using the phrase Zero Knowledge as a headline to this long explanation.
It's important to recognize that cryptographers already understand encryption and the terminology is intended for everyday folks. When I'm speaking with a technologist about how SpiderOak products work, I would typically use the phrase end to end encryption.
If we want to end mass surveillance, the only way this can happen is through viral adoption of end to end encrypted products and services. Great UX, education, and terminology are powerful tools, and unlike phrases involving the word "encryption", to my knowledge no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the term Zero Knowledge.
Following to their architectural design, they do not get access to any encryption key and no key leaves user device in unprotected form. Is not this enough to be advertised as "zero-knowledge" service provider?
Have you built something better? Its amusing to hear comments like this when there are really no commercially available alternatives that come close without managing your own. My time is much too valuable to run my own. If yours isn't, build one and share it and charge and market it using your favorite parlance and consider avoidin trolling the one company that's at least trying not to suck.
In addition to not being (fully) open source, something that also should be mentioned is, that if u use the mobile apps it unfortunately still isn't "zero knowledge" [0].
They've been around for a while and are highly regarded.
The one thing that makes their privacy weak is: The software involved in the encryption/password handling is not open source. We have only their word for it that they are not snooping or letting anyone else snoop.
If you're willing to do the extra work, you can get a cloud service like Dream Objects, and use software like duply/duplicity to store your files online and encrypted. You may lose some flexibility, though.
"If you're willing to do the extra work, you can get a cloud service like Dream Objects, and use software like duply/duplicity to store your files online and encrypted. You may lose some flexibility, though."
I encourage you to look into borg backup[1][2] which appears to have replaced duplicity as the de facto standard for "robust backups that the provider knows nothing about".
This is really the direction you look for providers[3] to go in - giving you a blank slate to write whatever bits you want to and allowing you to control the encryption with your own tools.
If you point borg (or duplicity) at even the most privacy-antagonistic provider, they still have nothing but gibberish.
I tried spider oak a while ago, and I thought it was horrible in terms of ui, performance and bloat.
I'm assuming they didn't change their stack/devs, so I will not even try this one.
> They've been around for a while and are highly regarded.
By who?
My only experiences with them have been horrible. Their client is buggy, slow and horrible and their support left tickets for literally months until they basically gave up and gave me a refund.
Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them.
In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading.
However I noticed something odd. According to my Mac's activity monitor, SpiderOak was only uploading in short bursts [0] of ~2MB/s. I did some test uploads to other services (Google Drive, Amazon) to verify that things were fine with my connection (they were) and then contacted support (Feb 10).
What followed was nearly __6 months__ of "support", first claiming that it might be a server side issue and moving me "to a new host" (Feb 17) then when that didn't resolve my issue, they ignored me for a couple of months then handed me over to an engineer (Apr 28) who told me:
"we may have your uploads running at the maximum speed we can offer you at the moment. Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading"
At this point I ran a basic test (cat /dev/urandom | gzip -c | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass pass:spideroak | pv | shasum -a 256 > /dev/zero) that showed my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it (Apr 30) after which I was simply ignored for a full month until I opened another ticket asking for a refund (Jul 9).
I really love the idea of secure, private storage but SpiderOak's client is barely functional and their customer support is rather bad.
I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well.
SO has no UI means to control version history. In order to limit version history (for example, to hourly versions per day, then 1 per day for a month, then 1 per week indefinitely), I need to run a script to close SO and run SO with some command line arguments. Having this functionality available in the UI would be nice.
The SO UI is slow to use. Over 6 years I have accumulated a lot of files and whenever I goto the manage tab to browse my files, it can take several seconds each time I expand tree nodes. The UI also becomes unresponsive, making browsing files take a while.
Manually deleting files/folders/version history is an absolute pain. Often, when deleting a folder in SO, only some of the contents are deleted, taking multiple attempts to delete. In some cases the contents of the folder disappear, but it shows root locations of drives as contents of the folder. When deleting anything, the UI becomes unresponsive for upwards of 30s, often significantly more for large folders or many version histories. Even selecting multiple files can take several seconds where the UI is unresponsive, the more files you select, the longer it becomes unresponsive. This makes file management take forever.
If I move a file temporarily, SO assumes it has been deleted and moves it to the 'Deleted items' folder. However, when I move the file back, SO create a new version of that file, leaving all version history in the deleted folder. It does not recognise the files are the same. This means that if a file is created and deleted numerous times (compiling pdf, or binary), hundreds of files with the same name are added to the 'Deleted items' folder. SO should be able to recognise the files are linked (perhaps checking the similarity of the files, only rejecting a link if they are more than 75% different) and create version histories instead of new files.
There is also no way to delete items in the 'Deleted items' folder after a period of time (2 years for example). The only way to delete items is to manually do it or clear everything, which I don't want to do as there are version histories that should be linked to currently existing files in the 'Deleted items' folder. I have had to resort to once a year putting a movie on and just manually going through folders for a few hours.
I really like the idea of SpiderOak, but it really is a poor implementation and just an all round pain to use. In the past I havn't minded waiting for new features and fixes, but its been 1.5 years since the new UI and nothing much has changed.
EDIT: And just to prove my point, I just tried to deleted a folder in the 'Deleted items' folder. The first attempt deleted everything within the folder, but a 'c:/' item appeared inside it. So I deleted the folder again. Half the contents of the folder a level above it just disappeared. This has happened before.
@rarrrrrr - Do you have a more precise timeline of when the SpiderOak Notes App will be launched in 2017? Would love to try it out as I'm getting tired of various issues w/ Evernote and haven't been able to find a good alternative yet.
Thanks for asking! I'm really excited about a ZK note app!
We haven't yet determined the priority of this vs. other projects in 2017. If you haven't already, please signal your interest below[1].
So far it is a prototype, although it is based on the already proven code used in Semaphor[2], our encrypted group chat and file sharing application, so it's "just" a bunch of UI work now :-)
I've liked SpiderOak's focus on privacy and security, but find the pricing to be expensive at every tier, and the space available not in tune for my needs (a jump from 100GB to 250GB, which is kinda ok, and then to a whopping 1TB).
Just as a data point for comparison, Dropbox charges $100/year for 1000 GB, but they don't do meaningful encryption, and therefore can de-duplicate your files vs. the files of all their other customers, which significantly reduces their storage costs (and allows for some entertaining information leakages!)
SpiderOak charges $120/year for 1000 GB.
Edit to add: SpiderOak deduplicates files within a single user's account (i.e. copies are free, and if you add another layer to a photoshop file and re-save, it won't take up the full space to archive both versions) but it is not possible [1] for us to deduplicate data across multiple users.
Just wanted to drop a note here… I've been a long time user of SpiderOak and am really satisfied with it. A much better alternative to Dropbox and alikes.
SpiderOak can backup and sync arbitrary folders (including external drives, network volumes, etc.) So one migration path is just to select the Dropbox folder for backup by SpiderOak. (Or just move data from Dropbox folder to the SpiderOak Hive folder.)
does anybody know if www.sync.com is any better regarding their mobile apps ?
They do also client-site,end-to-end encryption
but their white paper only mentions their web-app which apparently does everything on the client.
[+] [-] Canada|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvehent|9 years ago|reply
> In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
z.cash is a zero knowledge system and has a good definition of it on its FAQ:
> Zero knowledge proofs are a scientific breakthrough in the field of cryptography: they allow you to prove knowledge of some facts about hidden information without revealing that information. The property of allowing both verifiability and privacy of data makes for a strong use case in all kinds of transactions, and we’re integrating this concept into a block chain for encrypting the sender address, the recipient address, and the amount. A block chain that encrypts transaction data (making it private) and lacks zero-knowledge proofs also lacks the assurance that all the transactions are valid. This is because the nodes in the network can’t determine whether the sender really had that money or whether they previously sent it to someone else, or never had it in the first place. The encrypted data becomes unverifiable by network nodes.
source: https://z.cash/support/faq.html?page=0
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|9 years ago|reply
A few cryptographers have noticed SpiderOak's marketing term Zero Knowledge is inconsistent with the academic definition. Maybe it doesn't mean what we think it means[1]? SpiderOak was one of the first companies to use this phrase commercially and the need has only grown stronger.
At the heart of the issue is the difficulty for end users to decipher the terms cloud vendors use to describe their security. Doing so would require discrimination between transport encryption, data encryption, meta data encryption, encryption at rest vs. in motion, and then most importantly evaluate key management and access. This vocabulary is foreign to most folks. Vendors often exploit the inaccessibility of these topics to make a series of statements that, while often factually correct individually, together create a false sense of privacy.
SpiderOak launched a online backup product for Linux, Mac, and Windows in 2007. The competitors were companies like Xdrive, Mozy, Carbonite and SugarSync. Each claimed that customer data was fully encrypted. Even the most credible journalists writing for well funded publications with fact checking budgets were fooled and repeated these misleading claims to end users. [2]
In 2009 when Dropbox launched, they made misleading claims about the encryption of customer files and their internal ability to access customer's data or provide that data to 3rd parties, leading to a well publicized FTC deceptive trade practices complaint. [3] The deception had been so effective that leading software engineers were shocked to discover Dropbox had full access to the data they had stored online. [4]
In response to customer requests on one of their forums, Mozy explained why it would be "impossible" for a storage service to protect users' privacy by encrypting the file and folder names customers store in a way Mozy could not read. SpiderOak customers had benefited from the impossible for years.
Recently Slack made the unbelievable claim on Twitter that their service includes end to end encryption (it doesn't.) Perhaps they mean from your end to their end?
Lately there's a new phrase "customer managed keys" used by cloud providers, which sounds really great, but is typically just elaborate hand waving that ultimately allows the vendor and their staff the same level of data access as if it were not encrypted.
In 2007 we found ourselves frequently explaining "we don't know the names of your files, the names of your folders, the date they were created or last modified or accessed, their size, their checksums or hashes... in short we know nothing about your data except how much you store." We started using the phrase Zero Knowledge as a headline to this long explanation.
It's important to recognize that cryptographers already understand encryption and the terminology is intended for everyday folks. When I'm speaking with a technologist about how SpiderOak products work, I would typically use the phrase end to end encryption.
If we want to end mass surveillance, the only way this can happen is through viral adoption of end to end encrypted products and services. Great UX, education, and terminology are powerful tools, and unlike phrases involving the word "encryption", to my knowledge no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the term Zero Knowledge.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
[2] http://allthingsd.com/20080403/sugarsync-offers-the-best-met...
[3] https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/
[4] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html
[+] [-] Jivanyan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstatusthequo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinodotim|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://spideroak.com/manual/spideroak-on-mobile
[+] [-] danbruc|9 years ago|reply
Anyone any idea what the issue is or was? What would prevents you from doing PBKDF2, RSA and AES [1] on a mobile device?
[1] https://spideroak.com/manual/zero-knowledge-explained
[+] [-] BeetleB|9 years ago|reply
The one thing that makes their privacy weak is: The software involved in the encryption/password handling is not open source. We have only their word for it that they are not snooping or letting anyone else snoop.
If you're willing to do the extra work, you can get a cloud service like Dream Objects, and use software like duply/duplicity to store your files online and encrypted. You may lose some flexibility, though.
[+] [-] rsync|9 years ago|reply
I encourage you to look into borg backup[1][2] which appears to have replaced duplicity as the de facto standard for "robust backups that the provider knows nothing about".
This is really the direction you look for providers[3] to go in - giving you a blank slate to write whatever bits you want to and allowing you to control the encryption with your own tools.
If you point borg (or duplicity) at even the most privacy-antagonistic provider, they still have nothing but gibberish.
[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[2] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
[3] http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html
[+] [-] jbverschoor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veratyr|9 years ago|reply
By who?
My only experiences with them have been horrible. Their client is buggy, slow and horrible and their support left tickets for literally months until they basically gave up and gave me a refund.
[+] [-] _slwy|9 years ago|reply
In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading.
However I noticed something odd. According to my Mac's activity monitor, SpiderOak was only uploading in short bursts [0] of ~2MB/s. I did some test uploads to other services (Google Drive, Amazon) to verify that things were fine with my connection (they were) and then contacted support (Feb 10).
What followed was nearly __6 months__ of "support", first claiming that it might be a server side issue and moving me "to a new host" (Feb 17) then when that didn't resolve my issue, they ignored me for a couple of months then handed me over to an engineer (Apr 28) who told me: "we may have your uploads running at the maximum speed we can offer you at the moment. Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading"
At this point I ran a basic test (cat /dev/urandom | gzip -c | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass pass:spideroak | pv | shasum -a 256 > /dev/zero) that showed my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it (Apr 30) after which I was simply ignored for a full month until I opened another ticket asking for a refund (Jul 9).
I really love the idea of secure, private storage but SpiderOak's client is barely functional and their customer support is rather bad.
[+] [-] conta|9 years ago|reply
Indeed it seems that they are moving to another products...
[+] [-] elementalest|9 years ago|reply
SO has no UI means to control version history. In order to limit version history (for example, to hourly versions per day, then 1 per day for a month, then 1 per week indefinitely), I need to run a script to close SO and run SO with some command line arguments. Having this functionality available in the UI would be nice.
The SO UI is slow to use. Over 6 years I have accumulated a lot of files and whenever I goto the manage tab to browse my files, it can take several seconds each time I expand tree nodes. The UI also becomes unresponsive, making browsing files take a while.
Manually deleting files/folders/version history is an absolute pain. Often, when deleting a folder in SO, only some of the contents are deleted, taking multiple attempts to delete. In some cases the contents of the folder disappear, but it shows root locations of drives as contents of the folder. When deleting anything, the UI becomes unresponsive for upwards of 30s, often significantly more for large folders or many version histories. Even selecting multiple files can take several seconds where the UI is unresponsive, the more files you select, the longer it becomes unresponsive. This makes file management take forever.
If I move a file temporarily, SO assumes it has been deleted and moves it to the 'Deleted items' folder. However, when I move the file back, SO create a new version of that file, leaving all version history in the deleted folder. It does not recognise the files are the same. This means that if a file is created and deleted numerous times (compiling pdf, or binary), hundreds of files with the same name are added to the 'Deleted items' folder. SO should be able to recognise the files are linked (perhaps checking the similarity of the files, only rejecting a link if they are more than 75% different) and create version histories instead of new files.
There is also no way to delete items in the 'Deleted items' folder after a period of time (2 years for example). The only way to delete items is to manually do it or clear everything, which I don't want to do as there are version histories that should be linked to currently existing files in the 'Deleted items' folder. I have had to resort to once a year putting a movie on and just manually going through folders for a few hours.
I really like the idea of SpiderOak, but it really is a poor implementation and just an all round pain to use. In the past I havn't minded waiting for new features and fixes, but its been 1.5 years since the new UI and nothing much has changed.
EDIT: And just to prove my point, I just tried to deleted a folder in the 'Deleted items' folder. The first attempt deleted everything within the folder, but a 'c:/' item appeared inside it. So I deleted the folder again. Half the contents of the folder a level above it just disappeared. This has happened before.
I think I give up.
[+] [-] junhopark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|9 years ago|reply
We haven't yet determined the priority of this vs. other projects in 2017. If you haven't already, please signal your interest below[1].
So far it is a prototype, although it is based on the already proven code used in Semaphor[2], our encrypted group chat and file sharing application, so it's "just" a bunch of UI work now :-)
[1] https://spideroak.com/about/noteapp-signup [2] https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour
[+] [-] newscracker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|9 years ago|reply
Just as a data point for comparison, Dropbox charges $100/year for 1000 GB, but they don't do meaningful encryption, and therefore can de-duplicate your files vs. the files of all their other customers, which significantly reduces their storage costs (and allows for some entertaining information leakages!)
SpiderOak charges $120/year for 1000 GB.
Edit to add: SpiderOak deduplicates files within a single user's account (i.e. copies are free, and if you add another layer to a photoshop file and re-save, it won't take up the full space to archive both versions) but it is not possible [1] for us to deduplicate data across multiple users.
[1] https://spideroak.com/articles/why-spideroak-doesnt-deduplic...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gtramont|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumedh|9 years ago|reply
Can I sign up for 100GB first and then later upgrade to a higher plan seamlessly?
[+] [-] lyonlim|9 years ago|reply
I recently stopped renewing my Dropbox on an annual license and will switch once I find a good alternative..
[+] [-] Skunkleton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msh|9 years ago|reply
Their servers are slow compared to other cloud providers.
You can't upload files using their ios or Android clients, they are read only.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|9 years ago|reply
Any word if they're going to hook up a "import from Box/Dropbox" feature here?
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borplk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nenadst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fluxby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Numberwang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinodotim|9 years ago|reply
SPIDER OAK ONE PRICES
100GB - $5 monthly ($59/y)
250GB - $9 monthly ($99/y)
1TB - $12 monthly ($129/y)